Odessa A’zion, the actress who earned her A24 moment and then almost gave it back

Odessa A’zion

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 17, 2000 Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Marty Supreme, Until Dawn, Hellraiser
Awards	Trophée Chopard, Cannes 2026 · SAG Award · BAFTA

The question that follows Odessa A’zion everywhere is the one she never quite answers completely: how much of her trajectory was inevitable? Pamela Adlon’s daughter. Percy Adlon’s granddaughter. Lorenz Adlon’s great-granddaughter. A family in which film is not a career but a reflex. She grew up between Los Angeles and Germany, moving between a mother at the center of American independent television and a father embedded in a European filmmaking tradition that goes back two generations. When she started pursuing acting at fifteen — by getting her own agent, without her family’s blessing — there was no clean way to separate determination from inheritance.

What came next was a slow, deliberate construction of distance. She billed herself as Odessa Adlon for the early work: a recurring arc in Nashville, then Grand Army (2020), the Netflix drama where she played Joey Del Marco, a high school student navigating assault and loyalty in Brooklyn. Critics noticed. The performance held. But it was the name change that turned heads in a different direction — Odessa A’zion, lifting the middle name Zion, dropped the family surname and attached it to a reboot nobody expected much from.

Hellraiser (2022) was the Hulu reboot of Clive Barker’s franchise, and the consensus on arrival was that it was decent: serviceable horror, not the disaster it could have been, with A’zion giving Riley McKendry an interior life the script didn’t always earn. What the initial reviews didn’t account for was longevity. Three years on, the reboot has been reassessed as one of the stronger entries in the franchise’s history, and A’zion’s lead — a young woman in recovery, making one terrible choice after another without the screenplay ever reducing her to that choice — has been retroactively upgraded.

Horror is not prestige. The genre’s critical mechanics mean its best performances are reliably undervalued at first look — which is partly the point of taking on Hellraiser at all. It built A’zion a lane that few young actresses occupy: not the ingénue, not the awards-circuit presence performing suffering in close-up, but the lead carrying a genre film on her own credibility. That lane prepared her for what came next.

The work that proved everything different arrived in 2025, when Josh Safdie cast her as Rachel Mizler in Marty Supreme — the married Jewish housewife from 1950s New York who becomes Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser’s lifelong complication, his conscience and his contradiction. Safdie understood what the role required: someone whose Jewish identity was real enough to carry a period performance without it ever settling into caricature. A’zion is Jewish on her mother’s side; she grew up with that as fact, not performance. It showed. SAG nominations followed for outstanding supporting performance and, alongside the cast, outstanding ensemble. BAFTA nominated her for best supporting actress. At Cannes in May 2026, she was awarded the Trophée Chopard — Female Revelation of the Year, with Isabelle Huppert as godmother.

The complication arrived earlier in 2026, and it came from a different A24 project. Sean Durkin’s film Deep Cuts was adapting Holly Brickley’s novel, and A’zion had been cast as Zoe Gutierrez — a character written as both Mexican and Jewish. A’zion is not Latina. When the casting announcement went public, more than a hundred Latino creatives signed an open letter to Hollywood. She exited the project with a statement that named the problem precisely: she hadn’t read the novel before accepting. “I went in for Percy,” she said, referring to a different role in the film, “but was offered Zoe instead and instantly said yes.” The admission was clean, which made it both better and worse — better because the acknowledgment was real, worse because the speed of the yes, before anyone had read the source material, is the industry pattern that enables these situations in the first place. The irony was sharp: the same Jewish identity that made Marty Supreme possible had, in a less examined context, become a blind spot about someone else’s identity entirely.

She continues working at speed. I Love LA (HBO, 2025), created by Rachel Sennott, cast her as Tallulah Stiel, a chaotic Gen Z micro-influencer, and the show was renewed before its first season had ended. Mother Courage, filming in Montreal with Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, and Dianne Wiest, puts her for the first time in an ensemble anchored by that concentration of experience. She has a band — Dessa — plays piano and guitar, and performs around Los Angeles when shooting allows. The dual citizenship, American and German, is both biographical fact and structural metaphor: a career built between registers, between the industry’s assumptions about who she is and what she actually does when she picks up a role.

What Odessa A’zion is assembling by 2026 is the specific thing that cannot be directly constructed: a body of work that reads differently from its individual pieces. The Hellraiser reboot, reassessed. Marty Supreme, awarded. The Deep Cuts exit, absorbed. What comes next — Mother Courage and everything after — is where the pattern either holds or complicates further.

Featured Films

Until Dawn (2025) — Marty Supreme (2025) — as Rachel Mizler

Tags: actors, actresses, a24, Timothée Chalamet, Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme, Odessa A'zion

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